• Elastomers and Composites
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• v.48 no.1
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• pp.10-17
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• 2013

Polyolefin-g-poly(t-butylstyrene) as one of the high-temperature polyolefin-based thermoplastic elastomers was synthesized by the graft-from anionic living polymerization from the styrene moieties of the linear poly(ethylene-ter-1-hexene-ter-divinylbenzene) as a soft block to form the hard end blocks, poly(t-butylstyrene). The chemistry of the anionic graft-from polymerization involved complete lithiation of the pendant styrene unit of the soft polyolefin elastomer with sec-BuLi/TMEDA followed by the subsequent graft anionic polymerization of 4-tert-butylstyrene with Mn=10,000~30,000 g/mol. The graft-from living anionic polymerization were very effective and the grafting size increased proportionally with increasing monomer concentration and the reaction times. The synthetic methodology for the multi-hydroxyl chain-end modified polyolefin-g-poly(t-butylstyrene) was proposed by using the thiol-ene click reaction between 2-mercaptoethanol and the polyolefin-g-[poly(t-butylstyrene)-b-high vinyl polyisoprene], which was obtained from the subsequent living block copolymerization using polyolefin-g-Poly(t-butylstyrene) with isoprene. The result indicated that this process produced a new well-defined functionalized graft-type polyolefin-based TPE with high $T_g$ hard block(> $145^{\circ}C$).